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Death Metal writes "All of Earth's people, according to a new analysis of the genomes of 53 populations, fall into just three genetic groups. They are the products of the first and most important journey our species made — the walk out of Africa about 70,000 years ago by a small fraction of ancestral Homo sapiens."

Actually, there are four types of people in the world:
1. Those who keep on repeating "10 types - binary" joke.
2. Those who loves telling "3 kinds - can not count" joke repeatedly.
3. People who hate above mentioned jokes and whine about it.
4. Everybody else who does not give fuck.

My wife and I adopted three children from three different ethnic groups when they were infants (less than 6 months). They're all in the 3-4 age range now. One is a mayan indian boy, one is a typically hispanic girl, and one is a vietnamese girl. They look totally different from each other. In spite of this, people keep asking us if they're natural triplets. This of course is a great source of hilarity for my wife and me. Are they triplets?

Yes... man, was that a wild summer.Are they all yours?

Shhhh, she doesn't know she's not the mother!My favorite question is people asking whether they speak english.

People don't allege that Homo sapiens came from the Fertile Crescent. The thinking is that what we recognize as civilization came from there. Which, anthropologically and archaeologically speaking, seems to be correct.

Well, our civilization. Civilization arose in several places independently, including India, several places in the Americas, China, and Egypt (Its civilization developed mostly independently of the Levant & Fertile Crescent), and perhaps elsewhere, too.

Oh, and because I suck and didn't qualify this properly: The actual establishment and early development of Egypt's civilization was independent; its later history (Hittites onward or so) is actually pretty entangled with the rest of the Middle East.

Well, regardless of any trace of Neanderthal genes still present, one thing we know about humans is that if it looks...uh...screwable...someone, somewhere, sometime will have tried it. Just wander around the internet for examples today of just how out of the box some people think.

There's the problem of one man starting a whole new population would lead to inbreeding for a while, so that's the bigger problem. But if that happened and maybe Noah and his wife/wives didn't have any negative recessive genes, or the inbred populations didn't die off, or if you fiat it away (as theists often do), then it's totally possible for three initially identical subpopulations to diverge over many generations.

If Noah's sons all looked alike and went to different corners of the earth, it's still possible for black populations, white populations, and east asian populations to arise.

There's still that bigger inbreeding problem. And the total lack of real evidence. And maybe not enough time for that to actually happen with a strict interpretation of the torah/old testament/whatever.

It is interesting whenever science finds something and you can find something in holy literature that can seem to be a metaphor for it. Carl Sagan pointed out how the evolution of the human brain, the neocortex specifically, paralells the story of the apple of knowledge in interesting ways. Increased neocortical mass may be what really seperates us from animals, gives us shame and self consciousness, and interestingly may cause labor pains for women. Interesting, but it would be a mistake of course to interpret that as evidence for anything.

Obviously, no one should take that as proof of anything, as you can interpret anything you want. Still, it is interesting.

The way I understand it, inbreeding is a problem because of mutations in our genes.. with two different genes in the same place, the non-broken one can make up for the mutated one, but with inbreeding there's no redundancy.

Perhaps Noah's offspring hadn't evolved enough to have these corrupted genes - in that case, there wouldn't be a problem. (If I recall correctly there wasn't any law against marrying siblings until way later)

This basically say that the more diverse the gene pool, the more likelyhood of wacky combinations that are advantageous. It's more complicated than that, and I don't really get it all (my wife is in vet school, so she explained it somewhat to me). But basically, introducing foreign genes into the reproductive pool benefits the population as a whole significantly.

I've read and continue to read the Bible, and incest occurred. These 'other people' you talk of were descended from Adam and Eve. Contrary to the unread beliefs, Adam and Eve had children other than their famous three boys. In the Bible after Noah left the ark the only people available to marry was ones cousins for a considerable time.

OMFG guys! The bible is actually a PHB! Obviously Adam wrote the MM when he named all the animals, so that only leaves the DMG, which is obviously metaphorically referred to as "the tree of knowledge of good and evil."Adam and Eve weren't kicked out of the garden for eating fruit! they were kicked out because they were peeking at the DM's notes!

The advice and truths given in the Bible are credible because they mirror the real personal stories and events that happen in the world around us. Many myths and religions try to do the same, and they get some things right, but there is always the element of mysticism that has been injected by people trying to gain personal advantage. I know that many "Christians" have tried to do this too (most notably the catholic church and their instance that only the Pope can talk to God, which is in direct contradiction to the primary message of pretty much every book of the Bible, they also asserted in the past that only a properly educated person should be allowed to read the Bible), but such lies are easily uncovered by even a cursory independent look at the Bible.

There is nowhere in the bible where it says giving sacrifices will bring a good harvest (though it does say that you should make sacrifices to atone for your sins and celebrate God), or that your God-given leader will bring you to God (though it does say that Jesus loves you and has opened they way for you). It also doesn't say that you can get to heaven through your own personal works (though it does talk about the importance bearing good fruit).

There are a number of other elements to most religions which the Bible lacks, but the main difference is that most religious are designed to promote cohesion in society by establishing a theological basis for a hierarchal leadership structure (much the same way modern economics, philosophy and political science have established a theoretical basis for the same kind of structure). The Bible seeks to promote cohesion by explaining the benefits of good social behavior and uncovering the lies of society (society tries to tell us that bad behaviors like promiscuity, deceitfulness, idolatry and hedonism will make us happy, while in truth those behaviors separate us from the life-giving society we are a part of and will only lead to isolation and tragedy).

Please do not think that the behavior of most people who call themselves Christians is indicative of the content of the Bible. Many people use the Church as a social club to further their own worldly goals. Instead, read the Bible (it's not much longer than Atlas Shrugged, which you should also read BTW) with an open mind and see whether or not you agree that it is a better way to go about living.

Virgin birth is a relatively new idea. The immaculate conception meant that he was born without original sin, not without intercourse. As I recall, this was one of the things introduced at the Council of Nicea, where they tried to reconcile a few hundred incompatible versions of Christianity into one version; think of it as theological POSIX. As for burning bushes, I expect you'd be talking to burning bushes if you had to live in the desert for long...

But we can get people out of comas. You don't really believe that with the lack of understanding of medicine back then, that they would have the same rigorous definition of death as measured by brain activity do you?

But we can get people out of comas. You don't really believe that with the lack of understanding of medicine back then, that they would have the same rigorous definition of death as measured by brain activity do you?

Are you suggesting that after being nailed to a cross for the best part of a day, having his legs broken so he suffocated, and having a spear put through his side, that Jesus was not dead, but simply comatose?

Inbreeding doesn't *cause* genetic issues. It merely concentrates and thereby exposes those that are already present in a given gene pool, by increasing the chance of being homozygous for any given trait -- good OR bad.

Asians to a small degree? Which world history did you learn? Asian cultures were way ahead in most respects until roughly the Age of Exploration, and still on par until roughly the Enlightenment. Unfortunately some key internal weaknesses arose coincidently within the timeframe when Europeans were most actively colonizing, but ultimately that has been only a couple centuries of a developmental hiccup. The European Dark Ages were longer, and in my opinion, worse. Now Asia is ascendant again, and all things being equal, China will be the most powerful nation on Earth (again, but you obviously wouldn't know the history) in a matter of decades. Japan has managed to be second only to the US economically despite having a smaller total land area than Zimbabwe (wherein it logistically supports more than eleven times as many people with a quality of life, literacy, and depth of culture magnitudes greater).

Asia has a history of literature at least equivalent to that of Europe, as well as visual art and music, architecture and engineering, philosophy and religion, virtually every dimension.

To single out the Chinese, since I happen to know more about them than other Asian cultures, they invented the movable type printing press before Gutenberg, but their language was so complex that it wasn't practical so it didn't see a lot of use. They invented the compass, the crossbow, sericulture, belt drive, borehole drilling (did you know the deepest hole ever excavated by man before 1835 was done by the Chinese to extract salt brine?), a calendar as accurate as the Julian four centuries earlier (and another as accurate as the Gregorian three centuries earlier), cast iron, single and multistage rockets, negative numbers, porcelain, etc.

Though I would agree that the illiterate cultures of sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas have little real, objective value, that you can try to level similar charges at Asia suggests to me that you are either ignorant or truly bigoted.

Now Asia is ascendant again, and all things being equal, China will be the most powerful nation on Earth (again, but you obviously wouldn't know the history) in a matter of decades

But it's not, nor will it ever be.

People seem to forget that a nation's Government is the single largest institution that decides its prosperity by virtue of promotion or obstruction. Everything else after the fact is a moot point with regards to population and/or its resources available.

I think you're (deliberately?) missing the point. What I meant of course was 'barring any unforseen disaster or negative socio-political change'. China today is magnitudes better than it was two decades ago, let alone three, four, all the way back to Qianlong at the very least. China's government is still dangerous and corrupt, but it has been slowly improving.

Though the Chinese government has its faults, I don't think your statement, "a nation's Government is the single largest institution that decides its prosperity," disqualifies China from continuing its rise. The government is very aware of what will allow China's continued economics rise. This can be seen with some of the long-term partnerships China has developed with countries around the world. It is slowly learning how to implement a civil society without ensuring its own destruction.

But I disagree with your statement more generally, too. As ElectricTurtle said, East Asia, especially China, was on top of the world for about a millennium. And they didn't do it under a democracy. They did it because China has the world's oldest tradition of a meritocracy. Since Confucius, the way you made it up in the world was through passing an exam. That's why China has been able to rise so quickly -- the people value education, and are willing to sacrifice everything so that their children might have more.

I wanted to add one more example to ElectricTurtle's list. China had ships that could carry 15x the tonnage as Christopher Columbus' ships almost a century before he "discovered" America. And they were much harder to sink because they had separate compartments around the base of the ship. If one was punctured and flooded, they could keep sailing. Why didn't they become the great explorers then? Two reasons. One, China was the center of the world and so they weren't so interested in exploring. And two, the internal culture just happened to become xenophobic just as Zhenghe's (the admiral of the ships described above) era of exploration was coming to an end. (And, under the next dynasty, run by the Mongols, there was an effort to appease the Chinese by sticking to their traditions. This impeded progress. Sort of like if the U.S. all became Amish.)

To further cast doubt on the manifest destiny that "inevitably" lead to Europe's rise, consider this. The Europeans were brutal to those they colonized. They demanded submission and subservience. During Zhenghe's day, the Chinese didn't. They created trade pacts, but let the people be. So what might have happened if the wheels of development had been a little more favorably aligned for the Chinese (and all other non-Europeans?) What if Zhenghe had been alive at the time of Columbus? Do you think the people of the world would have rather dealt with the European colonizers or partnered with the must more respectful Chinese?

Shem was a faker.Ham was big and dumb.Japheth was a woodcarver who never got married and talked to puppets.Got into his head that one of them came to life and ran away from home, so he went roaming the world after it. Nearly drowned doing that.Claimed that he survived being eaten by a whale. Changed his name to Jonah after that.

I don't think anyone's fretting about it at all. AC is just wondering out loud.

Anyway, the worst that will happen is some group will protest the finding. The only people who are going to take the findings to conclusions about racial superiority are people who are using it to validate their pre-existing racism. Knuckle-dragging racists aren't made by facts, they're made by ignorance.

It wasn't that long ago that Anthropology texts said the same basic thing, dividing humanity into three groups called Caucasoid, Negroid, and Mongoloid. Then such texts were considered outdated, and worse. Now it appears to have come full circle, with exhaustive scientific investigation apparently verifying what earlier generations noted from simple observation.
Of course, 'What It All Means(TM)' for us today is another matter entirely.

The future of 'racism' is that word will fall out of fashion and pretty much cease to exist in a generation or so. It's hideously divisive in a modern context.At the start, where there was a serious belief in the western world that being non-caucasian meant you were sub-human, then the laws necessary to stop that were a boon.Now, anything gets shoved under the context of 'racism' that's meant to cause a knee jerk reaction.Say something about someone who was born in Ireland? Racist (their parents may have come from just down the road from you, but hey, 'racist')! Nobody from an 'ethnic group' turns up for interviews for jobs at your company for particular roles? Hey, you're not hiring enough of them, so you're racist.The worst thing about the modern "positive discrimination" isn't that it's actually the most prevalent form of racism at the moment, it's that it actually intimates that someone from an ethnic background isn't capable of performing well enough to compete against anyone else, and "allowances" have to be made for them. Filtering back into schools, there's a whole sector of kids that know they'll get jobs allocated to them under this, so don't consider it worth pushing themselves as hard to compete (some of my family work in the school system, and this drives them nuts!).

Face it, people are people, and some people don't like others for a variety of reasons. Mannerisms, attitude, so on, so forth. The way this used to be dealt with was a little thing called Etiquette, which for some reason seems to be considered horribly old fashioned and outdated these days. The basic principle was that you knew other people were flawed, in the same way you knew yourself to be flawed. Yet everyone needed to keep on going without killing each other. So you looked for the best in people, and given the chance chose to accept something as complimentary rather than derogatory (or at least did so at face), and you exchanged pleasantries, no matter how the barb ran underneath that.

Now, taking offense is an industry. If you can find a way to take offense to something someone says, there's a quick bit of cash to be had through a Lawyer somewhere who specialises in that. Taking offense on behalf of someone else (who frequently isn't offended at all anyway) is the way to obtain a false sense of self worth. Sure, it makes you feel good (after all, you're looking after "the children"/"some group that can't look after themselves"/"some other group that you're better, and more able than"). It puts you subjectively above them, even if that's not what you think you're doing.

When science comes up with these figures, it is NOT a method of saying "hey look, food for bigots". It is stating an observable fact. Anything beyond the figures is conjecture. There are three main branches of humanity that have been successful in evolutionary terms. That's possible failsafes in case there's a flaw in one or more branches of the genetic structure that some pathogen can take advantage of. It's a good thing.

If you instantly think of 'racism' over released figures, I think you're part of a longer, more insidious issue than ever these figures could be.

The future of 'racism' is that word will fall out of fashion and pretty much cease to exist in a generation or so.

That sounds a little like wishful thinking. In just a few generations we've made tremendous progress with prejudice, however, it is rampant in its grossest forms in much of the world, and about 10% of westerners, who are "ethnocentric".

Then there's covert racism, which is till common in modern society.
Peoples behaviour choices are influenced unduly by racial considerations - esp. when it's personal (eg: choosing a family doctor), or ambiguous (eg: I didn't employ the black person because of his credentials).

There are many ways to measure covert racism, however, be wary of the IAT [harvard.edu], it's highly controversial, so take what the researchers say about it with a grain of salt. Behavioural measures are the best (ie: watching what people *do*).

It seems that prejudice is built into the human condition - at least at a subtle level:

We form groups as power units

We all generate an in-group bias - it's part of a healthy self-esteem

We use stereotypes as cognitive shortcuts for organising and quickly processing information. There is no way to/stop/ stereotypes from forming, they are basic mental formations. The trick is not to/believe/ in the stereotypes that somehow get implanted in your head. That's pretty darn hard, and is similar to not having opinions about people. The stereotype, like an opinion, is a mental schema with which we process information.

As power units, groups compete, which is fertile ground for distrust and conflict (think republican vs. democrat)

Group cohesion relies on dumbing down individual processing. This has been experimentally shown. People are smart, but groups are stupid

The confirmation bias [wikipedia.org] means that a lot of information just doesn't get critically analysed.

That's just who we are as human beings, and it means that we're always going to tread a fine line between in-group preference and out-group prejudice, and have difficulty even seeing that that's what we're doing. And that's in ideal situations when there are plenty of resources for everyone.

1. Human genomes tend to cluster into three groups: african, eurasian, and east asian.

2. We expected that the genomes of different ethnic groups would be very different. They aren't.

3. Neutral drift is the major story in how ethic groups' genomes differ.

This pretty much follows the contours of the current orthodoxy in population genetics (with certain distinct exceptions).

So are these three points meaningfully true?

1. Human genomes tend to cluster into three groups: african, eurasian, and east asian.

Generally speaking they/do/ cluster this way. Of course, you can make room for as few or as many clusters as you want-- if it was two, it'd be african/everything else. Three, african/eurasian/east asian. Four, perhaps african/eurasian/east asian/naitive american. Five, perhaps west african/east african/eurasian/east asian/naitive american. From what I've read, the most elegant statistical clusters arise when you allow for four groups (splitting native americans off from east asians). Of course, this clustering gets more complex when you consider admixture populations (e.g., the majority of south america and mexico).

2. We expected that the genomes of different ethnic groups would be very different. They aren't.

It's hard to say this is true or false yet, because we simply don't know how functionally significant these differences are. Two genomes may look very similar, yet be very different in many very significant ways.

3. Neutral drift is the major story in how ethic groups' genomes differ.

This is code for a very contentious question-- are ethnic differences merely skin-deep? The fact is, we don't know yet. There's a lot of research that points to yes; there's a lot of research that points to no. The answer to this is undoubtedly going to turn out to be: yes and no, depending on the context and the threshold you look at.

I'd add a fourth point that to me is even more interesting (and apparently comes from the data):

As a result [*] African populations today have greater genetic diversity -- more variants in more genes -- than Eurasians or East Asians, and Eurasians somewhat more than East Asians.

* [The population split away from Africa 70K years ago, and then that sub-population splitting again 40K years ago into Eurasian and East Asian groups. The African source population is 130K years old.]

The San people (one of the first to split off from the earliest-known haplogroup) are supposed to have one of the greatest levels of genetic diversity of any of the African groups, which themselves are, as you say, generally more diverse than those that left Africa.

So, to get good genomic data from these people, you have to sample a lot more of them to get an accurate picture. I wonder if the researchers took that into account.

Oh, another point of interest. The earliest known religious structure in Africa is also 70K years old. Maybe Africans got fed up with them and kicked them out, the way the Europeans did with the Pilgrims.

2. We expected that the genomes of different ethnic groups would be very different. They aren't.

Seriously, how surprised can we be? We share 98% of our DNA with chimps. Hell, we share tons of DNA with single-celled algae [sciencedaily.com].

Think of the genome as a computer program, and genes are little subs that do helpful things. Lots of subs are sitting unused, abandoned, all over our genomes. Lots are called at different times by barely-related parts of our 'human program'. Very different programs can share lots of lines, lots of entire subs. Very different creatures can share lots of DNA, lots of entire gene

I take a general offense to the nature of this article, presenting this as though it is some sort of surprise. Researches along time ago classified people into 3 groups and this is merely genetic confirmation of the original findings. They classified people in 3 groups a long time ago, I suppose this is DNA confirmation of the initial categories: Negroid, Mongoloid, Caucasoid.

That's not really the same thing, that was classifying human remains via the rough shape of the skull. This is a bit more personal than that is. You may very well be correct, it's just that basing it on genetics is far more likely to have some sort of meaningful accuracy.

I take a general offense to the nature of this article, presenting this as though it is some sort of surprise.

Then you misinterpreted it. The suprise is at the degree of genomic similarity within the three groups. The groupings you mentioned seem to have been validated, but they weren't based on genome studies. Using those old "studies" you couldn't have said anything about the genetic similarity of two ethnicities within the, er, clades? Maybe you could have/did assume, but that would have been without any evidence.

The suprise is not that there are 3 groups, the suprise is that there are 3 genetic groups.

This is no surprise for someone like me who believes that the Bible is true. These three people that restart the human race came from one set of parents and therefore should have most of their genes in common. It is only logical that the three brothers Shem. Japheth and Ham would share most of the genetic code of their father and pass it on to succeeding generations along with certain individual variations that we still see today. What is so strange a

Because, like all the nonsense some ignorant folks made about Mitochondrial Eve, you don't know what you're talking about. No one said these three lineages separated at the same time. In fact, they didn't. So any attempt to marry this to your favorite mythology is nothing more than cherry picking certain statements, when the evidence, in fact, completely eradicates your beliefs.

Well, one of the moderations was "redundant", which is fair since someone mentioned the same thing again. But yeah, I think there's some general ignorance surrounding those terms - people think "Negroid" is a slur (just like that politician a few years ago who got lambasted for saying "niggardly"). From wikipedia: [wikipedia.org]

In physical anthropology the term is one of the three general racial classifications of humans â" Caucasoid, Mongoloid and Negroid. Under this classification scheme, humans are divisible into broad sub-groups based on phenotypic characteristics such as cranial and skeletal morphology. Such classifications remain in use today in the fields of anthropology and forensics to help identify the ethnicity, lineage and origin of human remains.

I'm not sure 'Team America: World Police' technically qualifies as South Park. Having written a paper on South Park and Team America as compared to Gulliver's Travels and and the Beggar's Opera in my Jr. year of undergrad (damn was that like 4 years ago already?) for my Restoration and 18th Century Literature class (my contention being the so-called "golden age of satire" is a misnomer), I'm somewhat sensitive to the subtle differences in the projects.(and frankly, that was probably the nerdiest under grad

Advances in communication and transportation in the last century mean that members of these three groups are migrating away from the areas their ancestors lived in. I live in Australia but my ancestors came from England. My wife was born in Malaysia but her ancestors came from China. Our son is a mix of two of the groups defined by TFA.

Yesterday he brought home a school project to work on. Each child in the class has to fill in a page in a scrap book about themselves. His classmates come from England, Spain, China, Egypt, Australia (one Aboriginal boy) and Turkey. The next generation here will be even more mixed than the last.

The BBC have an excellent documentary on this subject called The Incredible Human Journey [bbc.co.uk] up on the iPlayer at the moment. Its focus isn't quite the same as the article's, as it discusses genetics only as a means to confirm or reject theories of how humans made their way around the planet, but it's definitely worth watching if you're in the UK or can use a UK proxy.

I think the collective hallucinations of geology, biology and paleontology that support evolution are especially fascinating. It's amazing how so many scientists imagined into being so much demonstrable evidence for their delusion.

Only if you read the book of Genesis like a Catholic does- as an allegorical story explaining many things about the natural world and how to live in it.

Otherwise, no. And in fact, for the racists out there, this proves once and for all that Africans, of the three groups, are the most evolved, with the most diversity. The other two groups are subgroup descendants of the Africans.

Not really, humans as a species are just about as homogeneous as you're going to get, which makes it difficult to make those sorts of claims stick. Just as much of suggesting that Africans are inferior as superior. Additionally, there's been some research to suggest that African populations have more genetic diversity than other groups, which I wouldn't think would contribute to the suggestion that they're any more or less well adapted than other groups.

But then again, if it drives white supremecists nuts, why bother arguing.;)

Actually the summary is Bullshit. And the story ignores a bunch of details.
Look at the graphic [washingtonpost.com] associated with the study . They study 3 genes - two of which affects skin/hair color and another that affects the eye color. Then they find that these 3 genes mutate into 3 different groups.
I don't think this study in anyway shows anything more than show a genetic basis to skin/hair/eye color.

Otherwise, no. And in fact, for the racists out there, this proves once and for all that Africans, of the three groups, are the most evolved, with the most diversity. The other two groups are subgroup descendants of the Africans.

Then why are they still so fucked up?

</troll>

In all seriousness the genetic divergence is negligible, most of the problems in the black communities in the us stem from either latent racism or from serious endemic social problems (personally I believe it has more too do with the latter at this point)

You don't produce any citations, but I believe you are referring to a single study on IQ which concluded that asian populations had a higher mean and mode IQ than whites who, in turn, scored higher than blacks. There are several problems with this study.

The most obvious is that IQ is a terrible measure of innate intelligence. It is largely based on verbal reasoning, which is a small subset of what is traditionally regarded as intelligence. Not only is it a small subset, it's one that is improved a lot by education. Most people get a variation of around 20 points when they take different IQ tests, and generally the score improves by a few points on each subsequent test. If your education system focusses on verbal reasoning then you will score more highly in an IQ test.

Another major problem was the tiny variation in the results. Their results showed a variance of under ten IQ points between the top of the black bell curve and the top of the asian bell curve (at both the top and bottom ends, they were similar). On average, therefore, a black person will score 10 points worse than an asian person. Due to the variation between repeated IQ tests, this is completely meaningless. The variation between the same person taking two different IQ tests is likely to be greater than the variation between ethnic groups.

So, the study conclusively showed that the variation in a relatively meaningless test between members of different ethnic groups was small enough to be counted as experimental error, but presented its results as demonstrating racial superiority. I can't think why this isn't used in schools.

At the very least I find it hard to believe the Australian Aborigines aren't a distinct group since they separated from the rest of the race before Europeans left Africa.

Err... no?

There's some circumstantial evidence to suggest that there may have been early humans in Australia 80~125,000 years ago. But the genetic & archaeological evidence suggests that the arrival of the ancestors of current aboriginal Australians occurred 40~70,000 y.a.